"VOLAPÜK is the invention of the Rev. Father Johann Martin Schleyer, of Constance, Baden, Germany. He is an accomplished linguist, having for forty-six years been interested in the study of language. He can speak and write twenty-eight tongues, including the Chinese and three African languages, and is also eminent as a priest, hymnologist and religious editor. He invented his universal language in 1878, announced it in 1879, and had so far perfected it in 1881 as to publish in that year a small book, entitled "Entwurf einer Weltsprache für alle gebildte Erdbewohner" ("Plan of a Universal Language for all the Civilized Inhabitants of the Earth"). Thus the name, Volapük; _vola_ meaning of the world, and _pük_ language. "Schleyer does not propose that Volapük shall supercede any living language. He has attempted to make it so scientific and natural, so regular in all the rules of construction, and therefore so easy to learn, that every educated person will acquire it next after the mother tongue; and he hopes that it will thus become the accepted medium for all international communications. With this end in view, he has formed it on the general model of the Aryan family of languages; that is, its signs represent letters and words, and not ideas; and the root words of which it is constructed, instead of being arbitrary sounds and signs, as in Bishop Wilkin's philosophical language, or sounds that have a real or fancied natural meaning, as in Stephen Pearl Andrews' "Alwato," are taken principally from living languages, the English being more largely drawn upon than any other. "The alphabet employed is the Roman with some of the German dotted letters added, and the continental sounds are given to the letters. All words are phonetically spelled, so that there are none of the difficulties of orthography and pronunciation to be encountered which are so formidable in most natural languages."